The Fabric of Her Fiction
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The Fabric of her Fiction: Virginia Woolf’s Development of Literary Motifs based on Clothing and Fashion in Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and Orlando: A Biography Ritgerð til M.A.-prófs Ásta Andrésdóttir Maí 2011 Háskóli Íslands Hugvísindasvið Enska The Fabric of her Fiction: Virginia Woolf’s Development of Literary Motifs based on Clothing and Fashion in Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and Orlando: A Biography Ritgerð til M.A.-prófs Ásta Andrésdóttir Kt.: 040176-5359 Leiðbeinandi: Julian M. D’Arcy Maí 2011 Abstract This essay argues that leading modernist Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) broke new grounds in regards to the application of clothing in fiction. As well as being external indicators of a particular set of values or social status, clothing also exposed her characters’ inner realities, evoking various experiences and sensations. The essay demonstrates how, from her childhood onwards, Woolf was fascinated by clothes and fashion, leading to a profound influence on her life and work, as can be discerned throughout her works, though in the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando: A Biography (1928) and short stories ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’ (1923) and ‘The New Dress’ (1927) in particular. In Woolf’s fiction of the early twenties, the motif of clothing primarily constituted a marker for personal identity and class affiliation. By means of her term ‘frock consciousness,’ she explored her own feelings of inferiority and shame associated with being inappropriately dressed in public, the conflict of dichotomies such as mind and body, consumption and creation, femininity and masculinity. Mrs Dalloway criticized and exposed the social system as an impassable barrier hopelessly dividing people. In To the Lighthouse, Woolf explored abstract ways of applying clothing in fiction, using haunting symbols such as empty gloves, unfinished stockings, lost heirlooms and fading shawls, representing absence, grief and death, paying tribute to her late mother, eloquently fictionalizing memories related to and conjured by such objects. In Orlando: A Biography, Woolf turned clothing into elaborate and sophisticated metaphors of sex and gender and their assigned roles in twentieth-century society, moreover boldly criticizing the pomposity and vanity of the educated professions, still exclusive to men. Introduction...................................................................................................................1 From Victorianism to Vogue: Virginia Woolf’s Clothes-Complex..............................5 Fashion, Fear and ‘Frock Consciousness’ ....................................................................8 Satin, Seed-Pearls and Society’s Shackles..................................................................10 Theory, Shame and Scrutiny in ‘The New Dress’.......................................................15 The Looking Glass Shame .........................................................................................18 Mrs Dalloway................................................................................................................26 Frocks, Frivolity and Fashion’s Democratization .......................................................27 Poverty, Prayers and a Mackintosh Coat ....................................................................32 Ressentiment and Fashion’s Double Bind...................................................................36 If the Glove Fits: ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’.......................................................43 To the Lighthouse.........................................................................................................50 Knitting, Matchmaking and Misguided Charity .........................................................51 Fictionalizing Perception ...........................................................................................55 Clothes Take the Human Form ..................................................................................62 Veils, Shrouds and Shawls.........................................................................................66 Orlando: A Biography ..................................................................................................71 Clothing and Sexual Ambiguity.................................................................................72 Garters, Ribbons and Gold-Laced Pomposity.............................................................76 A Double Masquerade: Gender and Orientalism ........................................................83 Clothes Make the (Wo)Man.......................................................................................87 Cross-Dressing and Modernism .................................................................................93 Conclusion .................................................................................................................100 Bibliography ..............................................................................................................103 Introduction Whether we call it life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing, has moved off, or on, and refuses to be contained any longer in such ill-fitting vestments as we provide.1 In her landmark essay ‘Modern Fiction’ (1925), Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) boldly criticizes leading novelists for writing of ‘unimportant things’ and spending immense skill and industry, ‘making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and enduring’ (NA 2410). She urges writers of fiction to strip their subjects of insignificant exterior details, and to explore instead their characters’ inner realities and life’s chaotic nature. In her opinion, the nation’s leading writers are so constrained by the trappings of traditional fiction, for example an air of probability, that if all their figures ‘were to come to life they would find themselves dressed down to the last button of their coats in the fashion of the hour.’ Were the writer a free man, and not a slave to tradition, his writing would not contain such literary trimmings, ‘and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it’ (NA 2411). Having so ardently advocated the shedding of ‘ill-fitting vestments;’ the emblems of everything that needs be abolished in fiction, it might seem paradoxical that clothing is a leading motif in Woolf’s fiction, as manifested in strikingly wrought characters such as the fashionable socialite Clarissa Dalloway, impoverished Doris Kilman, overbearing Mrs Ramsay, dowdy Mabel Waring and androgynous Orlando. Importantly, by her 1 Virginia Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’, in Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. M. H. Abrams (London: Norton, 2001), 2410. All further references in the text (in parentheses) are to this edition, abbreviated NA. 1 polemic, she was by no means rejecting the significance of clothing as literary motif. What she was rejecting was its application as simply a realistic detail. Woolf was at the forefront of the modernist movement, which flourished in the first decades of the 20th century, encompassing every field of artistic expression. Instead of the real and the factual, modernists concerned themselves with perception and their subjects’ inner life, representing a self-conscious break with traditional forms and subject matter. They searched for a distinctly contemporary mode of expression fuelled by World War I and its prevailing sense of fragmentation and disillusion, as well as self-awareness, introspection and openness to the unconscious and to humanity’s darker fears and instincts.2 In Woolf’s fiction, clothing would therefore serve as a gateway to her characters’ inner realities; it would expose rather than conceal, evoking deep-rooted feelings often triggered by public scrutiny. Furthermore, while serving as the ultimate marker for social status, clothing would reveal suffering and guilt all across the class levels; an issue uniting and at the same time dividing women. Last but not least, Woolf would use clothing to skilfully create poignant metaphors, attacking gender inequality and warfare, both matters close to her heart. What makes Woolf’s application of clothing in her fiction even more interesting is the clothes-complex she harboured all her life, unequivocally influencing and interfering with her work. As excerpts from her diaries and autobiographical essays demonstrate, this complex was principally caused by her traumatic upbringing, characterized by Victorian taboos associated with body and dress, and the mental and physical molestation she suffered at the hands of her older half-brother George Duckworth. 2 Merriam-Webster’s Encyclopaedia of Literature (Springfield: Merriam-Webster, 1995), 770. 2 As pointed out by Laura Gwyn Edson, this trend towards abstraction by means of clothing also manifested itself in the visual arts, in Post-Impressionist formalism, which undoubtedly inspired Woolf and her fellow members of the Bloomsbury Group, the eccentric and controversial collective of brilliant writers, painters and designers. In The Conversation (1908-10), Matisse used the flatness of the artist’s prison-striped pyjamas to suggest domestic tensions; in Picasso’s portrait Ambroise Vollard (1910) the model’s business suit has been fractured into unrecognizable shingles.3 Similarly, the cluttered window dressings of the Edwardian period were replaced by the high theatrics of window dressing around core ideas.4 Last but not least, women’s clothing was revolutionized in the century’s first two decades, with